Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

(One of the most beautiful books ever written)

Making Trail

Friday Ramble - The SIsterhood of Eye and Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in mid January. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You burn candles and brew endless pots of tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan the cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way. The great horned owls who reside on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are repairing their nest in an old beech tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood. It makes me happy to think it is all happening again.

This morning, a single oak leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind, and it came to rest in the birdbath in the garden. A simple thing perhaps, but the pairing of pumpkiny orange leaf and blue snow was fetching stuff indeed, and the leaf bore in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf. Out of my small and ice rimed doings, a mindful life is made.

Thursday Poem - Straight Talk From Fox

Listen says fox it is music to run

    over the hills to lick

dew from the leaves to nose along

    the edges of the ponds to smell the fat

ducks in their bright feathers but

    far out, safe in their rafts of

sleep. It is like

    music to visit the orchard, to find

the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the

    rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself

is a music. Nobody has ever come close to

    writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot

be told. It is flesh and bones

    changing shape and with good cause, mercy

is a little child beside such an invention. It is

    music to wander the black back roads

outside of town no one awake or wondering

    if anything miraculous is ever going to

happen, totally dumb to the fact of every

    moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your seasons

    making love, arguing, talking about God

as if he were an idea instead of the grass,

    instead of the stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

    home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is

responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not

    give my life for a thousand of yours.

Mary Oliver, from Redbird

Wordless Wednesday - The Quiet Guest

Words or No Words

I was up before sunrise this morning and brewed up a dear little beaker of espresso in the Di Longhi, then lurched in here to write a blog post.

There were one or two recent photos I thought were OK, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to say about them. The words simply would not come. For someone who spends so much time with her nose in a book and thinking about word origins, the absence is a shocking state of affairs. Perhaps the cold has something to do with it. Has my brain succumbed to the elements and ossified? 

One thing about this winter - the village is growing some fabulous icicles. When sunlight shines through them, they shimmer and dazzle, and they seem to hold the whole universe. One can almost forget what a nippy undertaking it is, the glacial business of trying to capture them with a camera.

Sometimes, the best thing one can do is get out of the way and let the camera do its thing. No need to find words to go with the image - let it speak (or sing) for itself.

Sequestered, Week 326 (CCCXXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

A Little Melting Going On

Friday Ramble - January's Performing Arts

 

A rowdy north wind cavorts across the roof, rollicking through sleeping trees and shrubberies in the garden, making the frozen branches creak like old wooden sailing ships. The icicles suspended from the eaves behind the house are abstract glossy confections, streaked with gold and silver and filled with tiny bubbles. Ebullient gusts of wind shake them loose from their moorings, and the glassy shards plunge clattering into the pillowy snowdrifts wrapping the house.

Advised to remain indoors, I slip outside for a few minutes anyway and snap photos of nearby trees and icicles, chimneys and sky. Wrapped up and looking for all the world like a yeti (or an abominable something anyway), I stand in the pebbled snow in the garden and capture a few images, try to figure out how in the world I can describe everything, the perfect light, the burnished hues of the icicles, the emeralds of the evergreens, the blues and violets of the snow, the buttery siding on my neighbor's kitchen wall, the scarlet of a male cardinal as it flies into the cedar hedge.

The icicles communicate the colors and shapes of this day without any help from me at all. They rattle, chatter and chime, sing Gilbert and Sullivan duets with the wind (mostly bits from Iolanthe), pretend they are tubular bells at times or recite epic stanzas from the Poetic Eddas. The Norse elements of their performance seem fitting - at times it has been cold enough here for Ragnarök, and we wondered if this is the Fimbulwinter, the walloping winter to end them all.

With all the elemental performances being given this morning, few words are actually needed from this old hen. I can just stand here in a snowdrift with the camera, get out of its way (and my own) and let it see the world without trying to impose my questionable taste on its thoughtful and loving journey.

Out of the blue, a thought comes as I turn to go back inside before anyone notices that I am no longer in there, but rather out here. It is the images that are capturing me this morning, and not me capturing them. Methinks it's a Zen thing.

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or

companies of black-robed choristers;

to fill simply with hammered silver teapots

or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and

almond custards, polonaises, polkas,

whittling sticks, wailing walls;

that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers, from Firekeepers

Wordless Wednesday - First Light

The Church of Winter Trees

It snowed steadily in the village yesterday. This morning, clouds conceal the sky as far as the eye can see, and there is the promise of more snow. The park is hushed, and we are the only ones out and about at such an early hour.

The silent trees along our woodland trail are baroque columns holding up the winter day, and perhaps the whole world. The interlaced branches over our heads are cathedral arches dusted with fresh snowfall, and the soaring light-filled spaces are beautiful to behold. Here then is our church of winter trees.

Every twig and branch in the woods is outlined in white, and the place is like a winter scene from one of the Narnia books.  Now and then, the wind dislodges snowflakes, and they fall to earth, glittering faintly in the murk and whispering softly as they come to rest on the roots and stones and hummocks along our way.

Taking the trail before us would be a fine thing, but the thought of marking the pristine snow with our footprints is troubling. There is no need to announce our presence, to publish a claim to these moments and their perfect trappings. We will simply stand here a while and watch as the light dances around us and the day unfolds. The trail can remain unmarked for a while longer.

 We will find another way through the woods.

Sequestered, Week 325 (CCCXXV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

You really don't have to lose everything and travel to a remote valley to discover that the world is always rushing forward to teach us, and that the greatest thing we can do is stand there, open and available, and be taught by it. There is no limit to what this cracked and broken and achingly beautiful world can offer, and there is equally no limit to our ability to meet it.

Each day, the sun rises and we get out of bed. Another day has begun and bravely, almost recklessly, we stagger into it not knowing what it will bring to us. How will we meet this unpredictable, untamable human life? How will we answer its many questions and challenges and delights? What will we do when we find ourselves, stumble over ourselves, encounter ourselves, once again, in the kitchen?

Dana Velden, Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations

and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook

Morning Through the Fence

Friday Ramble - First of the Year

In January, it is tempting to remain indoors and curl up in the warm with a mug of tea and a book, but Beau and I need to be out among the tree people now and again, however short our stay on cold days. Rambles nourish and sustain us, and there is always something to see when we are out and about.

Earlier this week, we were on the receiving end of an ice storm, and village streets have been treacherous going, but trails in the woods were not bad at all. "Crunch, crunch, crunch" went our booted (and cleated) feet yesterday as we made our way along. It was surely our imagination this early in the year, but the woods seemed brighter than they were a few days ago. Sunlight sparked through the trees, and everything glittered. The light was sublime. We felt as if every jeweler's vault on the planet had been looted and the glittering contents spilled out at our feet.

There was flickering movement in woodland alcoves and hollows; shadows rippled and flowed as squalls gusted through the whiskery trees. The shadows seemed deeper and more intense, more blue. Here and there, a tiny sprig of frozen evergreen poked out of the snow, and the color was a hopeful thing, one that not even the biting north wind could carry away in its gelid paws. I often wonder why there are not more words in the English language for such blustery air currents.

Resolutions this year? With so much suffering and uncertainty in the world, my heart is not in making resolutions. There is just the same old work in progress, Beau and I wandering along together, breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

As we go, we will try to keep the words of Zen master and lay teacher Osaka Koryu in mind. When we breathe in, we will breathe in the whole universe. When we breathe out, we will breathe out the whole universe. We will ramble onward paw in paw as always, and we will simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. We will converse with the great trees along our way, and we will look for the light.

The first full moon of the calendar year will rise on Saturday evening (January 3), and skies are supposed to be clear that night so viewing conditions should be splendid. In the northern hemisphere, this month's full moon is often called the Wolf Moon because it was once believed that wolves howled more at this time of the year. Saturday's moon will be the first supermoon of 2026, and there will not be another until November. Wrap up warmly go outside for a look! 

Thursday Poem - Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and
suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts,
celebrates, leaves a space. I begin
again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and
leaves, only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye

(from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Happy New Year! 

Haud Hogmanay, Happy New Year

There is nothing like a festive tankard to start a new year, a lovely hot flagon of mulled wine with bits of fruit (oranges, cranberries and Meyer lemons), cinnamon sticks, a few cloves, and an anise star or two. I love those things. Yum.

Wishing you abundance, cheer and rude good health in 2026, wishing you a few festive beakers (or noggins or drams) too. Be warm and safe this evening, wherever you are, and whatever you are doing. Mind yourself!

May you find joy in your creations. May all your lessons be gentle. May fulfillment grace your life. May there be fine adventures on the road ahead. May every cup you hold in your hands contain a star or two and have a little light dancing in its depths. May good things come to you. Wander often, wonder always. Blessed be.

Like Honey In Her Cup

The north wind brushes snow away from ice on the river, and clouds of displaced snowflakes swirl through the air like confetti. Light flickers through the frosted trees on the far shore, and everything sparkles: river, snowdrifts, whiskery branches and frozen grasses. The scene is uplifting for a crotchety human in late December. She longs for light, and the sunshine is a shawl across her shoulders as it comes and goes through the clouds and the mist over the river—it's like honey in her cup.

Reeds fringe the river here and there, their stalwart toes planted in the frozen mud, and their withered stalks swaying in the wind. The spikes outlined against the sky are pleasing when one can actually see them, their artfully curling tops eloquent of something wild and elemental and engaging. So too are the frosted fields, fences and trees on the far shore, the cobalt hues of snow and sky, the diaphanous veil of cold mist hanging over everything.

We call the wetland plants bulrushes or reed mace, cattails, cat-o'-nine-tails or swamp sausages. We tuck them into floral arrangements, weave them into baskets, pound their rhizomes into flour, make paper out of them, or sometimes (as she was doing this day) just perch on a shoreline and watch them crackle and flutter in the wind. Members of genus typha are always pleasing, but most of all when they are hanging out in the frozen waters of their native place.

Everything has frozen over, and there are no birds about, but she remembers how the river sang as it thawed last spring. She remembers the jubilant songs of the returning Canada geese in springtime, summer's majestic herons standing motionless in the reeds at sundown, loons calling melancholy goodbyes as they left for warmer lodgings last October. She thinks of Vladimir Nabokov's memoir, "Speak Memory", and she smiles. On another day, that might have been a good title for this morning's post, but she likes the title she has chosen, just as it is. So be it.

The world around her is a manuscript written in wind and light. How on earth is she going to fit sky, wind, landscape and dancing snow into one 5 x 7 image?

Sequestered, Week 324 (CCCXXIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break, and all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

L.R. Knost

Standing in the Light

The Between Days

Here we are again, poised at the heart of the liminal interlude bookended every year by the Winter Solstice and the shiny new year only a few days away. These winter days are a precious (and much needed) breathing spell between the two holidays, and I like to think of them as the "between days".

It seems as though 2025 just got here, but we are bidding it farewell and considering 2026 with its unknown possibilities, adventures, trials and ordeals. A little abundance and a few gentle adventures next year, fewer ordeals, please. No departed loved ones, serious health issues, falling trees and crumbling chimneys. Enough already.

Holiday shopping (what little there was of it) was wrapped up and tucked under the little tree in good time this year. A thousand and one cookies were made, and fruitcakes, coffee beans, tins of baking and bottles of wine were delivered around the village. Gift bags, ribbons and wrapping paper have already been folded and put away for another time, and the silken rustle of the tissue as it was smoothed and pleated into neat squares was pleasing to the ear.

Now there is stillness in the little blue house, and after days of toing and froing, there is time for rest and reflection. Who knows what Beau and I will be doing on New Year's eve? Seasonal viruses are running amok in the village, and there is a possibility we will be home by ourselves, safely sequestered with wonderfully smelly candles, a wedge of fine old cheddar, a good book, tea, gingerbread and clementines.

I made a lovely big pot of Bigelow's Constant Comment tea this morning, and the kitchen was filled with the fragrance of oranges and sweet spice. Snow sparkled through the south facing window, and the kitchen was filled with silvery dancing light. As we leaned against the counter and waited for the kettle to sing, it seemed to us (Beau and I) that the best part of the holidays is the clamor and bustle when the house is filled with loved ones, all of us together and happy to be here.

There was laughter and camaraderie in the kitchen and around the old oak table in the dining room. Oceans of hot stuff were poured and heaps of munchies were consumed. There was an eloquent silence in the darkened garden when everyone went home after our revels were ended. Looking up at the waxing moon, we thought of our departed companion, and we sent him our love. Blessed be.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! 

May there be light and comfort in your life.

May there be laughter and good companions. 

May all good things come to you.

Wordless Wednesday - Morning, Suspended

Sunlight in a Bowl

It all started with a trip to Costco a few days ago for such homely things as laundry detergent, dish soap, dishwasher pods, potty paper and facial tissues. There was no intention of coming home with food items. Indeed, both pantry and refrigerator were well stocked, and I had resolved not to bring any edibles home.

Then bags of Meyer lemons came into view, and that was the end of that. I simply had to have them. Meyers are sunlight in a bowl, and a whole dish of them on the kitchen counter lights me up. Their fragrance is sublime, and they pose for photos cheerfully, always a happy thing. I told myself they were an absolute necessity and tucked a bag into my shopping cart. What other shoppers thought of the dotty old hen muttering to a towering display of golden fruit, I have no idea. I didn't care.

Whenever I lurch out to the kitchen to make another pot of tea or throw some sorry culinary effort or other together, the Meyers make me smile. Zen teacher, writer and chef Dana Velden says that a bowl of lemons can offer us the world, and I agree with her. On a dismal morning in the depths of winter, a little sunlight is a fine old thing, especially when there is another winter storm in the offing.

Resting easy in their dish, floating in beakers of tea or gently squeezed into muffins, scones and salad drizzles, Meyers delight the eye and gladden the senses. Like clementines, another splendid seasonal offering, they conjure warm climes, gentle breezes and faraway places. One ought to indulge in such things every chance she gets, and I do. My frugal inner voice can get stuffed.

Advent Sun Wheel Wreath - Five Alight

Merry Yule

Let There Be Light